For Jessica Rowe, every cloud has a silver lining … and she should know. Despite a childhood darkened by her mother’s struggle with mental illness, the gorgeous news television presenter welcomed everything life threw at her with a smile. When her mother was found vacuuming the bookshelves in the early hours of the morning, young Jessica Rowe knew that things were bad and about to get a whole lot worse. Terrified, she and her two little sisters would listen as their mother, Penelope, maniacally cleaned and scrubbed their flat all through the night, every night.
“And then,” recalls Jessica, “her whole face would be sunken and sort of hollowed out because she wasn’t sleeping. She would have these huge black rings under her eyes. She just wouldn’t look like herself anymore. She’d sink into herself, there would be a deadness in her eyes, there would be no light.”
As children, the Rowe girls – Jessica, Harriet and Claudia – learnt to read the warning signs that signalled an episode of their mother’s manic-depression and vigilantly watched out for them. “Do you think Mum’s okay?” they would worriedly ask each other. “Look at what she just bought. Is she about to go again?”
The frenzied cleaning, the manic behaviour that would precede the devastating depression, was a terrible “thing” that would take hold of, engulf, and distort their mother and, ultimately, send her back into hospital, sometimes for months. “Basically Mum would become catatonic. She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t talk, she couldn’t cope with any noise. She’d just totally withdraw and be so down and black.” Read how her mother’s breakdown and the collapse of her parents’ marriage have shaped Jessica into the person she is today. Full story in the November 2004 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
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